Dozens of people asked questions about the proposed Amp project Tuesday at the Nashville Downtown Partnership. / Brian Wilson / The Tennessean

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Brian Wilson

The Tennessean

If you go

Two meetings remain this week for the public to weigh in on the design and engineering of the Amp: • Midtown: 5:30 p.m. today, Metro Board of Parks and Recreation, large conference room, 2565 Park Plaza • West Nashville: 5:30 p.m. Thursday, West End Middle School, 3529 West End Ave.

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The second stop on the Amp development team’s route of public meetings proved to be a middle ground of sorts for the mass transit system’s supporters and detractors.

Dozens showed up to the lobby of the Nashville Downtown Partnership at the bottom of the Regions building to ask questions, air grievances and rally support for the proposed $174 million bus rapid transit line, especially the downtown section that would run a block away from the building.

The 7.1 mile route would run from Five Points in East Nashville to St. Thomas West Hospital in West Nashville.

On the three maps rolled out on tables, questions and comments were written in magic marker at the places where people thought problems could crop up, whether by the ability to make left turns into the Exxon gas station on Broadway or how traffic would be affected whenever trucks stop for extended periods at the Tennessee Performing Arts Center on Fifth Avenue.

The neighborhood-specific notes would be crucial to determining whether additional changes will be made to the proposal, said Holly McCall, the spokeswoman for Nashville MTA.

“No one wants to shove a bad project down everybody’s throats,” McCall said. “We want this to work.”

Event organizers thought the hottest point of the evening would come from the route’s Fifth Avenue corridor, the two-way road where buses would merge with other traffic before crossing the Woodland Street Bridge.

By debating those specifics, Gary Hawkins of the pro-BRT group Amp Yes said the broad vision of the project could be wrongly ignored.

“If people take a snapshot of this, then you can argue about it all day,” Hawkins said. “But it really is just that first step of something bigger.”

Project skeptics

Several project skeptics angry with the broad contours of the bus line were just as critical of the public meeting’s format, which was largely an informal question-and-answer period during which people could talk one on one with the project’s engineers.

Questions aside, the manner in which developers went about the plan annoyed Nashville resident Michael Rogers.

“They’re going up there and making it seem like a done deal,” Rogers said. “I just feel it doesn’t build trust.”

Because so much of the development remains in flux, whether from the amount of federal and state funding to the planning that still remains, there wasn’t much that could be gained from being there, said undecided downtown resident Julie Lammel.

When organizers come through the area again with public input meetings in March, she hopes more answers will be readily available.